Robots that can learn are by definition the scariest. Because when you learn but have no emotions you can come to a great logical conclusion that has no empathy. Think I Robot, where enslaving the human race to protect them from themselves makes perfect sense. Never mind the ethical and philosophical issues of machines becoming so good at thinking they may develop a sense of self.

@zerox203- Thanks. I do think one of the issues is the teams being divided, but not necessarily by distance but by intellectual property law. If I make a catching robot, I have IP on that. If someone else makes a fast robot, they have IP on that. So now if I want to make a fast moving catching robot, I have to either re-invent the wheel on the speed thing in a way that doesn't violate their IP or I have to license. Since commercial opportunities are still limited, licensing doesn't make sense.

So I think we've got people making lots of parts of a really assume robot and someone (the Defense Department? Google?) will have to put up the money to pull all of these together into a realy fast robot that sings while it catches balls and plays chess. We're probably going to see the same problem in robots that we see in smart phones. Competing companies will be paying each other every time they make a robot because of all the patent suits.

Another very interesting topic, and I really like the direction you've taken this one, Dave. Doing it by the numbers wouldn't really do the topic justice (and doesn't really reflect the 'intangibles' that would no doubt come up in a real fight), but keeping it in a controlled setting (no weapons, etc.) allows us some room to set up defined paramaters and base our conclusion on something ("robot" is too broad a category to just be shooting in the dark). I agree with you giving the belt to humans, too - Even though just looking at the categories, the "score" is 2-2, the "intangibles" cateogory counts for too much to ignore. Maybe we could design a specific robot that could beat a specific human under specific conditions... but if we ran 100 variations with different conditions and people, I bet the people would win more.

It is funny how difficult it seems to be to combine these disparate technologies into one robot or system. Maybe it's more a socioeconomic barrier than a technological one - the people making the catching robot are in France (I assume from the name) and the people making the singing robot are in Japan. That already creates a huge barrier for connecting the research and technologies. Nevertheless, it seems that we're waiting for that one 'aha!' moment that will let us make robots that are less one-track and more interoperable. Maybe that will lead us to what futurists call 'the singularity'...

@David. I agree. you know by now, I thought we will be having space or moon colonies. I was disappointed that we went to space but we can't seem to go back. I guess now that the government don't have that much money to spend we can't just get people out of earth as we did in the past.

@Thomas- Ha! Well yeah, but we already know what would happen between say a drone and a human pilot or a soldier versus a robot weapons platform. They'd be toast.

The drones can out turn a human in a plane because they don't have to worry about blacking out. So they'd win. A robot weapon platform carries way more firepower than a human could (though I'll admit that they are't nearly as smart).

This seemed like the fight we hadn't really talked about. And it felt the most human somehow.

I don't see a robot with all the qualities you have discusses still far away. My prediction may be in a 100 year.

A hundred years? That seems fairly extreme to me, Pedro. It was only a little over 50 years between the Wright Brothers putting a plane in the air and Sputnik. 60 years to we put people on the moon.

100 years is a lot of time in engineering, especially since we've already had out Kitty Hawk moment in robots. That said, it is funny how having an automonmous robot doing all of these things at once is so much harder than sending a spacecraft out of our own solar system, spmething we've already accomplished.

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